10 Problems Only WWE Fans Will Understand
If you can’t stand the (cheap) heat, get out of the kitchen.
There’s something truly special that comes along with solidarity. Members of support groups connect with one another in sympathy over shared experiences of abuse and addiction. Protesters on marches bond with one another while facing down corporate or governmental corruption and greed. The X-Men banded together to stand up for one another against a world that hated and feared them.
There are a number of parallels there with the dilemma of WWE fans over the years. The WWE Universe is a support group millions strong... although we can’t ever agree on anything important. We’re used to protesting the decisions and exploitation of the giant corporation that controls our lives... although we probably wouldn’t need to so much if we actually had lives.
And we’re totally exactly the same as the X-Men. 100%, absolutely. Snikt.
Okay, so maybe there aren’t many parallels with groups offering genuine solidarity and support. We’re not the most supportive fanbase, if truth be told: there’s more backbiting and infighting in wrestling fandom than a wasp’s nest in a heatwave.
This article is dedicated to the things we actually have in common...
10. There’s Too Much Content To Keep Up With
It seems like a weird thing to complain about. There’s too much wrestling on TV! My eyes! My eyes!
However, for those of us with lives (you know: jobs, families, friends; books to read, even) it’s hard enough getting to watch all of Monday Night RAW in a single sitting, not to mention Smackdown Live, 205 Live, NXT and whatever they call pay-per-views these days.
Then there’s all the other content the WWE Network offers: old school stuff dating back three decades or more, documentaries, comedy and all of the behind the scenes stuff. There aren’t enough hours in the day to watch the WWE programming you really like, let alone put up with the stuff you don’t like on the off chance it’ll get better.
The thing is, this isn’t Lost or Game Of Thrones. If you forget an episode of RAW, you won’t usually miss anything important. It’s far more likely that the show will be a bad photocopy of the previous week’s bad photocopy, with the slight variations on the same few matches and a challenger pinning a champion in a non-title match.
Except we’ve all been sitting there when it hasn’t been like that: when Brock Lesnar returned to WWE, or when Punk dropped the pipebomb, or any one of dozens of other moments that arrived out of nowhere.
And that’s why we watch all this stuff, live or as close to that as possible - because WWE still has the power, even if only occasionally, to surprise us.